My Writing Journey Katy Brent

My Writing Journey

Katy Brent

How To Kill Men and Get Away With it began as an embryonic idea with an elevator line of ‘a stabby Sex and the City’, when I started a Faber Academy writing course in 2018. At the time I was, along with half the planet, a bit obsessed with Jodie Comer in Killing Eve and I really wanted to write a kick-ass female character. I had a sort of Buffy Summers-type woman in mind, only she wasn’t slaying vampires, but the cheating, lying men who were breaking the hearts and souls of her friends. I even had Kitty the Fuckboy Slayer as my working title. 

As the idea developed, it made sense to make the men Kitty targeted into proper monsters instead of just players. The #MeToo movement was everywhere and – of course – the omnipresent news alerts of women being killed by men kept on rolling around. I knew for readers to sympathise with Kitty – who is obviously a sociopath – she needed a relatable MO. I think most women understand the sentiment of never feeling completely safe in your own skin to some extent.

I’m also a fan of American Psycho (novel and film) and began to toy with what it would look like if written today. Obviously, Patrick Bateman and his terrible crimes were set against the backdrop of Yuppie New York in the 1980s, so I began to think about what the equivalent of that would be now. Influencer culture seemed like the obvious answer. Pre-pandemic Instagram was full of young women who seemingly did nothing apart from travel to exotic locations and post beautiful photos, or show off all the free stuff they were being sent. But they were just pictures (at the time, no reels or stories way back in 2018) and who knew what was actually going on behind the lens. What if one of these seemingly perfect and #blessed influencers had a Really Dark Secret?

The story just flowed from there really. I was watching Made In Chelsea at the time and thought how wonderful it would be to set a story in that over-privileged world. I decided to make Kitty an heiress but it had to be something completely non-glamorous. And what’s less glam than meat production and distribution? In my head she was the granddaughter of a Bernard Matthews-type figure and legacy, but I decided to make her vegan because what’s more fun than a vegan serial killer?

I finished writing the novel, which was called How To Kill Men and Influence People by this point, during the (whispers) lockdowns of 2020 – along with some mentoring help from authors Julia Crouch and Stephanie Butland – and started querying with agents in early 2021. Spoiler alert – this did not go well. While I had some wonderful and super useful feedback and a good few requests for the full manuscript, a rejection is still a rejection. They’re kind of hard to rebrand as ‘life lessons’ as far as I’m concerned!

Everyone always says not to take them to heart and will tell you how many rejections JK Rowling had before the first Harry Potter was published (12, by the way, I sometimes had 12 rejections before breakfast) but it’s bloody hard not to when your inbox is full of them. In the end I started looking at publishers with imprints who accepted un-agented submissions. I sent the MS to a few places and then got on with my life. I enrolled on a Creative Writing MA at the University of Winchester and thought I’d shelve HTKM for a while and come back to it with fresh eyes later. 

To say I was stunned when I got an email from HQ Digital – a HarperCollins imprint – offering me a two-book deal is the biggest understatement that has ever been. I actually had three offers directly from publishers in the end, but HQ were incredibly lovely and my editor, Belinda Toor, was so riotously passionate about getting Kitty’s story out in the world. I signed with HQ the same day I started my MA which was a very odd but not-at-all-unpleasant position to be in. How To Kill Men and Get Away With It was released on ebook and audio on October 12 last year and the paperback is out on February 16. 

I signed with Euan Thorneycroft at AM Heath Literary Agency in June 2022 who was impressed enough by HTKM that he overlooked the fact I was already in a two-book contract. Having someone believe in you to the extent they want to represent you even though you probably won’t make them much or any money immediately is a huge confidence boost. Publishing can be so brutal, especially if you’re like me and have skin so thin you’re practically inside out. There have been so many tears and slumps and incapacitating bouts of imposter syndrome, but when you find your people, there is nothing quite like it. 

My second novel – which is a sort of chick-lit friendship story/feminist murder mystery, I love a genre straddle – is currently scheduled for November and there are a few other exciting things in the pipeline too. If you’d have told me this 18 months ago when I was ready to give up, I would genuinely have asked you if you needed a nice sit down and maybe a little holiday. It’s all still very surreal. Day-to-day I’m still in my Jeffrey Dahmers (pyjamas, thanks to Annaliese for that bit of slang) in front of my laptop most of the time so it’s super weird to see reviews pop up from all over the world. But it’s been my dream since I was a little girl and I’m so SO ridiculously happy that I didn’t give up.

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Katy is an author and award-winning journalist from the UK. She has worked on newspapers, magazines and websites since 2005, writing about popular culture. How To Kill Men and Get Away With It is her first novel.

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HOW TO KILL MEN AND GET AWAY WITH IT

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing